Fedora 13 guest fails, error looks like keyboard failure

[John Foderaro]

This bug report is described on the forums at ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=33034

Since that report was made I've done further testing. The failure occurs whether the host is Windows 7 or Linux.

Also it appeared that keyboard input was simply not being accepted after 20 minutes or so. Further testing showed that the keyboard input was accepted it is just that the display wasn't being updated to show the characters being entered and the results of entering such characters. It is as if X believes that a large opaque window covers the whole screen. Thus X appears to not be sending redraw events to the windows on the screen. Certain operations can force the windows to redraw themselves even without a repaint event and in that case you see the keystrokes you've been making beforehand.

This failure seems to occur more quickly if network activity is happening. I took a totally vanilla Fedora 13 install and added the Forecast Fox extension to Firefox. This caused periodic network activity to check the weather.

Within 20 minutes the guest had gotten into the state described above where windows are not redrawn so it appears that the keyboard isn't working.

The bottom line is that there is something in Fedora 13 that is not compatible with Virtual Box 3.2.6.

[John Foderaro]

I should have noted above that all systems involved in this bug report are 64-bit, multi-core, and the problem happens with both Intel and AMD CPUs.

[John Foderaro]

I built a Fedora 12 64 bit system and used it on the same two Windows 7 hosts as I had been using for the Fedora 13 system.

With Fedora 12 VirtualBox performed flawlessly.

I don't know what it is about Fedora 13 that VirtualBox can't support. I do recall the release notes for Fedora 13 mentioning that more of the graphics card manipulation was going to be put in the kernel. Perhaps that's the important difference.